The theater, the cinema and ourselves (1947)

the pick-up girl. The denunciation of the girl, to the judge by her friend's mother (Ilona Ference and Ernest Jay.) 1946. 12. THE PICK-UP GIRL The pick-up girl was surely conceived rather than written — a long series of visits to the American juvenile delinquent courts, no doubt a period of digestion, and then the play. It is obviously true to life, but the problems are so human that it seems to matter little whether they occurred in England or America. Nor could it have been first produced under better conditions. The intimacy of a really small theatre was exactly in tune with the intimacy of what was taking place. In the front row of the tiny Lindsey we might have been Elizabethians almost literally reclining on the stage, yet we felt rather that we were in a public gallery at the Law Courts not looking at a stage set. We left realizing what a lot we should all gain, young and old, by going more to the Law Courts and seeing at first hand the raw drama of life, that takes place there. "Elizabeth Collins" is no stage beauty, she is just a nice-looking girl whom we might meet in any street, hovering between childhood and womanhood, only more distressed and perplexed. After all what she did did not seem at the time so very dreadful. And her parents too are just a middle-aged couple that we might meet any day only more anxious and worried. Never was a play less "acted", never more really alive. It was the same in the larger theatre in the West End, and even in the provinces at Reading, with quite a different cast, it was still essentially itself, just a scene in a juvenile court. It would indeed be difficult to be false in the pick-up girl, the subject is too intensely human. Nothing is shirked, nothing crudely over-emphasized. The girl still with a 27